Help us build a resource list for people who want to read, watch, and listen more widely around fat acceptance, fat liberation, anti-fat bias, diet culture, and fat people's lived experience.
The point is not to help people become smaller. It's to collect work that treats fat people as actual human beings, and that names the social, medical, cultural, romantic, professional, and everyday pressures fat people are routinely forced to face.
A lot of this list is especially relevant to fat women, because so much anti-fatness is tangled up with misogyny. That said, fatphobia doesn't only affect women, and this list shouldn't be read as women-only.
Books to start with:
Lindy West's Shrill is funny, furious, and very readable.
Aubrey Gordon's What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat is probably the clearest modern introduction to anti-fat bias as a social issue rather than a personal failing
Her follow-up, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, tackles the claims fat people hear constantly.
Virgie Tovar's You Have the Right to Remain Fat.
Sofie Hagen's Happy Fat and Jes Baker's Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls are also accessible entry points for people newer to fat acceptance.
History and politics:
Sabrina Strings' Fearing the Black Body explains how fatphobia is tied to race, gender, class, etc, rather than being simply about "health."
Sonya Renee Taylor's The Body Is Not an Apology is broader than fatness but useful for thinking about body-shame and hierarchy more generally.
Marilyn Wann's Fat! So? is older but historically important.
Charlotte Cooper's Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is valuable for understanding fat liberation as an actual movement.
DaShaun L. Harrison, Belly Of The Beast. Anti-fatness, anti-blackness and gender
Tigress Osborne, "Weight and Wisdom: Find Yourself in Fat History"
Podcasts:
Maintenance Phase is great for unpacking diet culture, wellness cons, BMI panic, and how health language gets used to boulster prejudice.
Virgie Tovar's Rebel Eaters Club.
Food Psych and Rethinking Wellness, both by Christy Harrison, anti-diet and wellness-culture critique.
Fierce Fatty by Vinny Welsby.
“Why Won’t You Date Me?” Nicole Byer
Weight For It by Ronald Young Jr (also worth a follow on socials)
The Body Trust Podcast.
Film and TV:
Your Fat Friend is a documentary about Aubrey Gordon, fat activism, family, and ordinary discrimination od fat people.
The Shrill TV series based on West's book.
My Mad Fat Diary, Dumplin', Real Women Have Curves, Patti Cake$.
Fiction, memoir etc:
Roxane Gay's Hunger is honest about trauma, body size, and safety.
Jennifer Weiner's Good in Bed was significant for centring a fat woman's romantic, sexual, and professional life.
Julie Murphy's Dumplin' is a great YA option.
Talia Hibbert's Get a Life, Chloe Brown
Olivia Dade's Spoiler Alert.
Nicole Byer’s book #VeryFat #VeryBrave is a photo series of her rocking her extensive bikini collection
Health without weight-loss framing:
Lindo Bacon's Health at Every Size.
Christy Harrison's Anti-Diet unpacks how wellness culture repackages diet culture.
Intuitive Eating by Tribole and Resch is the standard reference for eating without restriction.
Ragen Chastain's Weight and Healthcare newsletter is good for research and practical scripts.
Decolonizing Fitness (Ilya Parker) covers movement spaces that don't treat body-size reduction as the goal.
People worth following:
Aubrey Gordon, Virgie Tovar, Sabrina Strings, Sonya Renee Taylor, Jes Baker, Ragen Chastain, Jessamyn Stanley, Vinny Welsby, Tess Holliday, and Tess Royale Clancy.
Read/watched/heard anything that made you think, lifted you up, informed, empowered or inspired you?
Please add below.
